Magnum Opus

Here's Sue at my place, perusing a great achievement. It's a history of the world called Sentience, and this is Volume 1, Origins. This first volume of the trilogy consists of 620 pages plus bibliography.  One of my ex-lovers, Sandra Karp, began work on it in the late 1970s, soon after she completed her PhD in medieval history at Tulane University. Despite love affairs, Hurricane Katrina, life-changing moves, deaths, and unexpected developments of every imaginable (and some unimaginable) kind, Sandy has persisted. Her home has always been filled with books, notes, computers, and cross-referencing devices. Now at the age of 76, her vision is failing, but with the help of her current lover of 33 years, she has put it all together into a form she can mail out to those of us who have been cheering her on for all these years.

Sandy writes in her introduction, "Origins, the introductory volume to this series, is a global narrative of Earth's self-organization, how time, gravity, and environmental feedback mechanisms sustained it, and the successive transformations that have occurred since Earth's formation some 4.6 billion years ago to approximately 4.4 million years ago, when sentients gave birth to the earliest human beings." Volume 2 will tell about human beings, and (spoiler alert) she is going to conclude that we are all deeply interconnected.

It has been awe-inspiring and hope-giving to see her persistence over the years. It gives new meaning to the expression, "an army of ex-lovers cannot fail." I am happy beyond measure that she has lived long enough to see her perseverance and scholarship bear fruit.